MODERN COLOUR THEORY FOR TRADITIONAL AND DIGITAL PAINTING MEDIA

Colours of twenty two common artists pigments at various thicknesses over a white ground. Photographed colours displayed in YCbCr space using the program ColorSpace by Philippe Colantoni.

This website presents an account of the dimensions of colour and light perception, written for painters using either traditional or digital media. The conceptual framework presented here was developed as a component of Colour, Light and Vision, a course in colour theory and practice for artists that I have been presenting since 1998 at the Julian Ashton Art School, Sydney, ofTheories of Colour, a lecture course on the history of colour theory and practice that I presented at the National Art School, Sydney, in 2009-2011, and of ongoing practical painting classes at both schools.

Acknowledgements

Warm thanks go to the "Dimensions of Colour team", Xavier Peria, Ray Kristanto, Noopur Patel, Atania Trinata, and Debolina Bandyopadhyay from the 2007 second year Multimedia course at the Billy Blue School of Graphic Arts, Sydney, and their teacher Dave Agius, for creating the site, including the interactive animations. Thanks also to Ben Green for generously hosting the site during its first year online, and to ibiblio, "the public's library and digital archive" at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, for accepting the site into their collection and hosting it since then. Finally, thanks to all of those who have added links to this site on their websites, blogs and forum posts, and especially to the following for their published comments:

Interactive demonstration of additive colour mixing. Drag the top, middle and bottom triangular yellow sliders to the left to control the brightnesses of the red, green and blue spotlights respectively. Copyright David Briggs and Ray Kristanto, 2007.